Iranian drones hit the US embassy in Riyadh as Tehran continued to launch waves of retaliatory strikes at the Gulf and Israel, while Israeli soldiers began operating in southern Lebanon on the fourth day of an increasingly regional war in the Middle East.
The drone attack on the US embassy in Riyadh caused a minor fire, prompting the diplomatic mission to tell Americans to distance themselves from the compound. The attack followed an earlier Iranian drone strike on the US embassy in Kuwait, as Iran continued to target US bases, facilities and personnel in Arab Gulf states.
The pro-Iran group Hezbollah also continued to target Israel, saying it launched two missile salvoes overnight targeting military bases in northern Israel. In response, Israel continued to carry out strikes and issue evacuation orders for villages in south Lebanon, virtually emptying out the country south of the Litani River and turning the southern suburbs of Beirut into a ghost town.
On Tuesday morning, the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, said he had instructed Israeli soldiers to “hold and advance” into areas of south Lebanon to prevent further Hezbollah fire on northern Israel. It was the first acknowledgment that Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah would not just be aerial but would involve boots on the ground.
Meanwhile, US and Israel continued their strikes against Iran, with the US claiming it had destroyed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps command and control facilities.
What started as a war between Iran on one side and the US and Israel on the other has turned into a regional conflict with dizzying speed, with new fronts being opened on each day.
The US and Israeli air war against Iran began on Saturday with attacks against Tehran, killing the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and prompting Iranian retaliation against Israel and missile attacks at Arab nations with US bases across the region. The fighting expanded rapidly to include at least nine countries and various pro-Iran groups.
On Tuesday, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the war against Iran could take “some time”, saying that while it would not “take years”, it could drag on. “It’s not an endless war,” he told Fox News.
The US president, Donald Trump, who has issued a series of contradicting statements regarding the length of the war, also said on Monday that it could take “far longer” than the initially planned month.
US officials including the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, also flirted publicly with the idea of US boots on the ground in Iran, an anathema to analysts, who pointed to the country’s vast, mountainous geography as an obstacle to any troop presence.
The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the “hardest hits are yet to come”, as administration officials said their plan for the Iran campaign had so far gone better than expected.
US officials offered varying justifications for why they launched the war in Iran, with Rubio claiming the US’s hand was forced by Israel. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” he said.
Trump, for his part, has at times said the goal was regime change in Iran, and at other times said he was solely trying to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and curb its ballistic missile programme. Iran has consistently denied it is developing nuclear weapons.
Netanyahu was more plain in his objectives, saying the US and Israel were “creating the conditions” for the Iranian people to topple their government. Israeli analysts suggested the Iran campaign came at a good time for Netanyahu and would boost flagging poll numbers before legislative elections.
In Iran, explosions were heard overnight across the country and particularly in the capital as the US-Israeli campaign continued. Estimates of people killed in the strikes ranged from 555 people to 1,500, including 165 people in a strike on a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran.
Iran continued to shoot bursts of ballistic missiles at Israel, most of which were intercepted. A few missiles broke through the country’s sophisticated missile defence system, killing 11 people in Israel.
The US acknowledged the deaths of six soldiers, seemingly killed while stationed in Kuwait.
Iran’s strikes against energy infrastructure in the Gulf have paralysed the oil-rich Gulf states, with Qatar announcing a halt to its largest liquid natural gas production facility, while Saudi Arabia ceased operations at its Ras Tanura oil refinery.
Global energy prices jumped further after Iran closed the strait of Hormuz, a global chokepoint for hydrocarbons, hitting several ships who attempted to cross.
“The strait of Hormuz is closed,” said Brig Gen Ebrahim Jabbari, an adviser to the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards, threatening to bomb ships that tried to cross. “Don’t come to this region.”
In Lebanon, Israel signalled that its campaign against Hezbollah could also be a long one. Similar to the war in Lebanon 18 months before, Israel steadily emptied out the south of the country through evacuation warnings, then filled in the areas close to the border with Israeli troops.
It was unclear, however, what resistance Hezbollah could offer this time, as Israel has severely degraded the group’s capabilities through two years of daily airstrikes. Over the last two days, Israel has announced the killing of senior leaders in the group, including Hussein Makled, Hezbollah’s intelligence chief.
It also targeted the logistical parts of the Lebanese armed group, including the Hezbollah-run bank al-Qard al-Hassan, members of its political bureau, and struck a building belonging to its media channel al-Manar on Tuesday morning. Rights groups have said that it is illegal to attack non-military targets, even if they are affiliated with the group.
So far Israeli airstrikes have killed 52 people and displaced at least 29,000 in Lebanon.
Hezbollah has continued to attack Israel, announcing that it struck the Ramat David and Meron airbases in northern Israel with one-way drones, and that it had targeted a base in the Golan Heights with rockets.
Domestically, Hezbollah has come under fire for pulling Lebanon into a war with Israel, in violation of the government’s stated neutrality. On Monday, Lebanon’s government took the unprecedented step of banning Hezbollah’s military and security activity. The government instructed the judiciary to arrest the individuals responsible for firing rockets at Israel.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
